Foucault's Vacuum

She buzzed across 84, then to up onto 290 — in the early morning in the warm, lemony subcompact. The tape player vacillated between working to cassette-consuming to completely inoperable, so in its lieu the graces of AM radio were the soundtrack for the travel home. She had a running joke, which very few of her friends found humorous, that it would be fixed at the turn of the millennium, while digital devices would see their own demise. So far, none of that was the case.

There were almost no other travelers on the highways tonight. They were all either still at their festivities, or drunk, or sleeping it off, or just sleeping. The station, as a commercial-free gift for their loyal listenership, exhaled a steady stream of broadcast news bits from since artificial, human radio signals existed, each section of relevant bits book-ended by a sonic flourish, lasting barely a second, created by an overzealous post-prod technician. The agglomeration of world news scenes flashed in and out, and formed a disjointed, schizophrenic narrative of worldwide catastrophes and unprecedented events.

Her attention drifted back to the conversations that had happened throughout the night, with her friends and acquaintances: the task of the musician to keep the listener’s immersion into the art, proper and regrettable concepts for tattoos, the most effective method of scaring girls outside their windows, and armchair theological musings on the impact of the Parousia occurring directly at midnight (in her time zone, naturally). The conversations were as similar as the current radio broadcast in their disorder and meaning, but it was the complete, unedited patchwork of dialogues that would make the entire night a memory for years to come.

So as she sped through the city of dozens of colleges at least ten miles over the speed limit — ready for sleep, through the frigid northeastern winter air, on a virtually barren major highway — the sounds of the world behind the new millennium met her ears and was a hopeful suggestion of the new years that lie in wait.

The tires of vehicles, spun by overly cautious drivers braving the unplowed streets, had cut striations into the hardened snow on the road. He used the grooves as a suggestion for his routing, and as he ran he imagined what the revenge would look like on his reversal, at the places where his footprints exacted justice upon the crisscrossing sets of lines for cutting their parallel audacities into nature’s flat sheet of white flaky toss-downs.

The dense suburban sprawl rolled with medium families in miniature houses and small hills and sidewalk-parking. The houses glowed and bubbled with light and gatherings from the inside, while their outsides blinked with lines of candy-colored illuminations strung expertly along gutters, bushes, and thresholds: just as the tire-tracks, another mark of men.

He turned around at a cul-de-sac, thus creating the midpoint. In the spaces between songs in his ears, the only sound to be heard was his breathing and the only motions to be seen outside of the endless stream of houses were his gloved hands and the warm steam of his exhalations. Like a bundled pink dragon he threatened to breathe fire with each striding rhythm, and turn to water each new territory of imperfect frost that appeared in front of him on the yuletide journey home.